Oh my! Recall Mr. Zuckerberg’s triumphal tour of America, in which he proclaimed the ‘Opioid Crisis‘ as one of his most pressing political concerns, the other topic I can’t recall. A Politics of Non-Politics? As those Honorary Degrees were presented with great solemnity to The Internet Wunderkind. Or should we just call him an ugly duckling looking for dates?
The anguish of the defenders of respectable bourgeois ‘values’, especially coming from propaganda headquarters of the Free Market Mythology , The Financial Times, reeks of the self-exculpatory, if not utter hypocrisy: nothing new!‘Shares fall’ is the central concern of this news story’s headline! Profit and Loss the central Capitalist dialectic. How to define that elusive Market Exceptionalism? Its permissible, until its practice offends what remains of the accepted bourgeois norms, that in a perverse way betrays that closely held Neo-Liberal Faith, of its stalwart advocates/apologists: then ‘let the heavens fall’ ! Consider the time lapse between the Zuckerberg triumphalism, to his fall from grace! 21 inch screen black and white TV melodrama.
As the internet is a public utility, overseen by profiteers of all stripes, like television, where was the FCC’s political/civic responsibility in holding public hearings, and writing laws , for Facebook and other internet companies that placed the public’s interest before all else? The FTC is exactly the wrong place for some pseudo-regulation, the pervasive and pernicious Neo-Liberalism rules our politics infected with Market Nihilism! The Free Market Mythology is a prima facie attack on the political responsibility of government, indeed the entirety of the republican tradition, to protect its citizens from the unscrupulous opportunist, in this case, under the cover of an idolatry for an ‘Internet Pioneer’